"The whole trash of Lukashenkovo ​​Belarus." How does the Nexta Telegram channel work, which calls Belarusians to the barricades

Belarusian Telegram channel NEXTA LIVE -media-break in the year. At the height of protests, he became the main source of information about what is happening. His audience strives for 2 million-in a 10 millionth country. How many people are in the NEXTA Live team? Where do they get information from? Who finances them? We tell.

What is NEXTA?

The Nexta Live channel (“Nekhta” is “someone” in Belarusian) was created on the basis of the YouTube blog of the same name. In 2015, he began to lead the 17-year-old schoolboy Stepan Putilo: “There was a desire to accumulate the entire Trash, which takes place in Lukashenkovskaya Belarus.” Nekhta is one of the blogger network pseudonyms.

At first, the YouTube channel was filled with weekly collections of news. Friends told Putilo that “no one needed it,” he himself was not sure of the prospects. But soon the number of subscribers began to be measured tens of thousands. Now there are more than 400 thousand. The videos collect millions of views.

Popularity threw problems. Now Putilo is studying at the University of Silesian at Katowesses (Poland), where he, in his expression , was “evacuated”.

In February 2018, the blogger came to visit a family in Minsk. They immediately came to his apartment with a search. The reason was a statement at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which an unknown citizen of Belarus wrote in Putilo, who saw an insult to Alexander Lukashenko in one of the Nexta videos. In the end, they did not get it, but Putilo decided not to go to Belarus anymore. Now he is 22. He is afraid that he will be taken into the army.

Stepan Putilo

Founder NEXTA

“I am not the media and not even a journalist, so many norms that some particularly zealous subscribers appeal to me do not apply to me”

NEXTA Live path to 2 million readers

NEXTA Live Putilo began to develop the Telegram channel in 2018. He grew up due to plums, says Dmitry Smirnov, editor of the largest private Belarusian Belorussian TUT.BY Portal. “Every day, dozens of people from different areas and professions write to me - from border guards to sellers in stores,” said Putilo himself in an interview with TUT.BY. When he just began to gain subscribers, the most popular in Belarus was the Telegram channel “Belarus of the brain” (now-435 thousand subscribers). But its creator constantly lived in Belarus - this connected the hands of both his administration and potential informants.

The first explosion of popularity in the history of NEXTA Live happened in May 2019, when he reported about the traffic police officer who died under strange circumstances. 22-year-old lieutenant Yevgeny Potapovich was found in the forest near Mogilev with a bullet in his head. Two days later, the cause of death was called suicide. According to investigators, being on duty, Potapovich suddenly left the route, climbed into the forest and sent the colleagues a message: “Urgent. Black "Volga". Three gypsies. Registration sign - Russian. " Then he snapped the handcuffs on his wrists and shot himself. The history of the media around the entire post -Soviet space, but it was the Nexta channel that was the first to tell it.

According to Putilo, he was informed of the incident by a source that had previously sent police reports. “On the one hand, there was confidence in the source. On the other hand, having re -read this message again, I just could not believe that this is possible in Belarus now, ”he admits. Putilo asked the informant to send a photo of the certificate, then he began to receive photos of reinforced patrols on the streets and made sure that the information could be reliable. He typed the text of the publication with "trembling hands."

By the beginning of August, Nexta Live had a little more than 300 thousand subscribers. Now-almost 1.8 million. None of such an audience has a single news channel in the world-not counting the Channel of the Indian government dedicated to the Covid-19. As of August 13, NEXTA is part of the global top 10. If we assume that at least 70% of NEXTA Live subscribers in Belarus (two years ago Putilo estimated that 70% of its users of its YouTube from Belarus), it turns out that 15% of the country's citizens read the channel.

1 784 482

Nexta Live had subscribers at the time of publication of this text

"If not us, then no one"

On the day of the election of the President of Belarus and in the first days after them, the Internet practically did not work in the country. The authorities claimed that the whole thing is in cyber attacks from abroad. Independent experts called it the "state Internet Shatdown." Belarusians have two means of quenching information hunger: state television and Telegram.

The messenger continued to work thanks to the "anti -censer mechanisms", the inclusion of which was announced by Pavel Durov. “The Belarusian collective farmers will probably not be able to do anything with him [Telegram],” Putilo said prophetically in the video with which the Nexta Live Telegram channel began in April 2018.

Unlike the Russian authorities, the Belarusian never even tried to learn how to block Telegram. Now, perhaps, they are pity. Recently, Alexandra Lukashenko, TELEGRAM has clearly strained: he complained about “oppositionists in separate gangster telegram channels” and “ugly channels that hid in Moscow, and from there melted towards Belarus”.

From the means of informing about Nexta Live protests, it quickly turned into a tool for their coordination. On the first day, organizational messages began to appear: in which entrances you can hide from riot police, where to find clean water, from which side the security forces arrive. Hundreds of chats for mutual assistance and coordination appeared around Nexta Live, up to the district. In this network, they publish templates of leaflets with calls for a strike, instructions on how to get into a coupling and protect against shots. About two million subscribers are observing what is happening on the streets of Belarusian cities almost in real time: here a group of protesters runs from riot police, here they are warned that in the next yard an ambush, people from the balconies are stirring by the security forces.

“If not we, then no one,” explains the ally of Putilo Roman Protasevich transformation of the channel from almost the media into a weapon of protest. He admits that it was difficult for him, a former media worker, "to cross the line, when this turns from a journalistic project into a national one." In conditions when “the opposition in the country is virtually not, and the main opponents were imprisoned”, NEXTA administrators “conferred for a long time and decided that we should start not only to write materials, but also to relay the thoughts of simple Belarusians”.

Stepan Putilo

Founder NEXTA

"I am a simple Belarusian who, by the will of fate, was lucky enough to become a mediator between truth and society"

Who helps Stepan Putilo

Now Nexta Live and other Nexta projects (in addition to YouTube channel, these are several more channels in Telegram) are engaged in four people. The 25-year-old editor-in-chief of all Nexta projects Roman Protasevich, like Putilo, lives in Poland. He joined NEXTA in early 2020, when Putilo decided to make a "full media with the editors." He wanted not to take up this an “anonymous from the Internet”, but a person “proven for the years of friendship”, who would be outside Belarus. “If the second administrator will be in Belarus, and the police will be removed by his phone with the rights of the administrator, write is gone. The channel will simply be destroyed, ”he explained . Putilo is now engaged in the main video.

The small NEXTA team processes thousands of messages from users, of which the Nexta Live tape is now mainly. “On ordinary days before the start of the elections, we had about a thousand messages, now in a minute-180-250. At the peak moments of protests, 10 thousand messages per hour come, ” said Protasevich.

Who pays for the work of Nexta? Protasevich claims that Nexta “has never received a grant or a proposal from third organizations or countries”, she “does not and will not have” external sources of financing. And no one proved the opposite, notes the Belarusian journalist Pavlyuk Bykovsky in a conversation with The Bell. Putilo himself claims that advertising covers all expenses (she really sometimes appeared in Nexta Live until recently). In addition, he receives a scholarship at the university.

Obviously, Nexta Live played an important role in organizing the protest movement. But neither Putilo nor Protasevich are his leaders. Even the rival of Alexander Lukashenko Svetlana Tikhanovskaya called herself "not a leader, but a symbol." This protest simply does not have leaders. According to political scientist Ekaterina Shulman, protests without a leader are successful, but more often these are protests that do not pretend to be replaced by power. For example, OCCUPY WALL STREET, “Yellow Lines” in France or Black Lives Matter. “Such movements do not give rise to leaders and do not accept them, because they have no goal of putting a leader in the chair of the Prime Minister or President,” says Schulman. “But if the purpose of the protest is a change of power, it is still better for him to find his leader.”